Recently, in the wake of the Bologna Declaration and similar international initiatives, there has been a rapid increase in the number of university courses and programmes taught through the medium of English. Surveys have consistently shown the Nordic countries to be at the forefront of this trend towards English-medium instruction (EMI). In this paper, we discuss the introduction of EMI in four Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden). We present the educational setting and the EMI debate in each of these countries and summarize relevant research findings. We then make some tentative suggestions for the introduction of EMI in higher education in other countries. In particular, we are interested in university language policies and their relevance for the day-to-day work of faculty. We problematize one-size-fits-all university language policies, suggesting that in order for policies to be seen as relevant they need to be flexible enough to take into account disciplinary differences. In this respect, we make some specific suggestions about the content of university language policies and EMI course syllabuses. Here we recommend that university language policies should encourage the discussion of disciplinary literacy goals and require course syllabuses to detail disciplinaryspecific language-learning outcomes.

The aim of this paper is to examine the role of language dominance in loanword phonology. It is investigated how onset clusters in loanwords are integrated into Turkish by two groups: English-Turkish bilinguals in Turkey and Swedish-Turkish bilinguals in Sweden. It is hypothesised that the bilinguals in Sweden will display significantly higher rates of cluster adoption because Turkish is not the dominant language there.

The data were collected through an oral loanword elicitation task, a text recitation task in the second languages and a questionnaire on language proficiency and use.

The study had 53 participants (24 in Turkey and 29 in Sweden). The material consisted of 29 loanwords from English and French, and of 50 structurally comparable words in the bilinguals’ second languages. The data were analysed auditively by the author and subjected to an interrater reliability test.

The results confirmed the hypothesis as the bilinguals in Sweden displayed significantly higher cluster adoption rates. The difference between the groups’ medians was 36.5 percentage points. Furthermore, it was shown that in individual speakers the combination of accurate second-language pronunciation, and clearly higher proficiency in the second language (corresponding to the donor language) compared to the L1 (i.e. the recipient language) guaranteed very high cluster adoption rates.

This paper provides the first rigorous quantitative proof for the theoretical assumption that accurate pronunciation is not sufficient for structural adoption in loanword phonology but needs to be complemented with sociolinguistic variables. Furthermore, it demonstrates in greater detail than before how societal and individual dominance are connected and through which channels they impact loanword integration.

Self-reported relative proficiency in the donor language was shown to be a powerful predictor of the sociolinguistic incentive to adopt and could therefore be used as a quick and reliable alternative to elaborate and time-consuming attitude investigations in loanword phonology.

This paper investigates how linguistic competence and sociolinguistic incentive contribute to the preference for adopting illicit onset clusters in established loanwords in Turkish. The participants are English-Turkish bilinguals in Turkey and Swedish-Turkish bilinguals in Sweden. Competence is measured through second-language pronunciation and incentive is operationalised through second-language dominance and degree of Turkish use. The data comprise French and English loanwords that are embedded in an oral fill-in-the-blanks test and that have phonetically similar counterparts in English and Swedish. The results show that the bilinguals in Sweden have significantly higher cluster adoption rates than the bilinguals in Turkey due to an overlap of high competence and high incentive in the Swedish context where Turkish is a minority language. Statistical analyses show that incentive has greater impact than competence in this sample.

In the phonological integration of loanwords, the original structures of the donor language can either be adopted as innovations or adapted to the recipient language. This dissertation investigates how structural (i.e. phonetic, phonological, morpho-phonological) and non-structural (i.e. sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic) factors interact in determining which of these two integration strategies is preferred. Factors that affect the accuracy of the structure’s perception and production in the donor language as a result of its acquisition as a second language are given special consideration. The three studies in the dissertation examine how the same phonological structure from different donor languages is integrated into the same recipient language Turkish by two different types of initial borrowers: elite bilinguals in Turkey and heritage bilinguals in Sweden. The three investigated structures are word-final [l] after back vowels, long segments in word-final closed syllables, and word-initial onset clusters. The main hypothesis is that adoption will be more prevalent in heritage bilinguals than in elite bilinguals. Four necessary conditions for adoption are identified in the analysis. Firstly, the donor-language structure must have high perceptual salience. Secondly, the borrowers must have acquired the linguistic competence to produce a structure accurately. Thirdly, the borrowers must have sufficient sociolinguistic incentive to adopt a structure as an innovation. Fourthly, prosodic structures require higher incentive to be adopted than segments and clusters of segments. The main hypothesis is partially confirmed. The counterexamples involve either cases where the salience of the structure was high in the elite bilinguals’ borrowing but low in the heritage bilinguals’ borrowing, or cases where the structure’s degree of acquisition difficulty was low. Therefore, it is concluded that structural factors have the final say in the choice of integration strategy.

This paper investigates how bilingual borrowers integrate originally long vowels and consonants in loanwords from Arabic and Swedish into Turkish in illicit positions. Both historical corpus data and data from an elicitation task are used. The main focus is on the role of perceptual salience and the choice between adaptation and adoption as different integration strategies. The results show that length is accurately perceived in both cases of borrowing due to the particular linguistic and extra-linguistic contexts of second language acquisition. Phonologically long Arabic vowels and consonants as well as not phonologically but phonetically long Swedish vowels with high salience are adopted as innovations by the bilingual borrowers. The latter adoption confirms that the input to loanword integration is not phonological but phonetic in nature, i.e. the surface form. Phonologically long Swedish consonants with low salience due to short duration are, instead, adapted through shortening. This adaptation is done in production through a process called filtering in with the help of feedback from perception. The paper proposes that perceptual salience plays an important role not only in monolingual but also in bilingual borrowing by concluding that high perceptual salience is necessary but not sufficient for adoption in bilingual borrowing.

We examined potential sources of morphological variability in adult L1‑English L2‑Spanish learners, with a focus on L1‑L2 similarity, morphological markedness, and knowledge type (receptive vs. expressive). Experiment 1 uses event‑related potentials to examine noun‑adjective number (present in L1) and gender agreement (absent in L1) in online sentence comprehension (receptive knowledge). For each feature, markedness was manipulated, such that half of the critical noun‑adjective combinations were feminine (marked) and the other half, masculine; half were used in the plural (marked) and the other half in the singular. With this set‑up, we examined learners’ potential overreliance on unmarked forms or “defaults” (singular/masculine). Experiment 2 examines similar dependencies in spoken sentence production (expressive knowledge). Results showed that learners (n=22) performed better with number than gender overall, but their brain responses to both features were qualitatively native‑like (i.e., P600), even though gender was probed with nouns that do not provide strong distributional cues to gender. In addition, variability with gender agreement was better accounted for by lexical (as opposed to syntactic) aspects. Learners showed no advantage for comprehension over production. They also showed no systematic evidence of reliance on morphological defaults, although their online processing was sensitive to markedness in a native‑like manner. Overall, these results suggest that there is facilitation for properties of the L2 that exist in the L1 and that markedness impacts L2 processing, but in a native‑like manner. These results also speak against proposals arguing that adult L2ers have deficits at the level of the morphology or the syntax.

In this article, we explore whether cross-linguistic differences in grammatical aspect encoding may give rise to differences in memory and cognition. We compared native speakers of two languages that encode aspect differently (English and Swedish) in four tasks that examined verbal descriptions of stimuli, online triads matching, and memory-based triads matching with and without verbal interference. Results showed between-group differences in verbal descriptions and in memory-based triads matching. However, no differences were found in online triads matching and in memory-based triads matching with verbal interference. These findings need to be interpreted in the context of the overall pattern of performance, which indicated that both groups based their similarity judgments on common perceptual characteristics of motion events. These results show for the first time a cross-linguistic difference in memory as a function of differences in grammatical aspect encoding, but they also contribute to the emerging view that language fine tunes rather than shapes perceptual processes that are likely to be universal and unchanging.

According to the thinking-for-speaking (TFS) hypothesis, speakers of different languages think differently while in the process of mentally preparing content for speech. The aim of the present paper is to critically discuss the research carried out within the TFS paradigm, against the background of the basic tenets laid out by the proponents of this framework. We will show that despite substantial progress in the investigation of crosslinguistic differences in the organisation of information in discourse, the studies that actually examine the cognitive aspects of speech production are, to date, vanishingly few. This state of affairs creates a gap in our knowledge about the thought processes that co-occur with speech production during language use and acquisition. We will argue that in order to reach a more comprehensive picture of the cognitive processes and outcomes of speech production, methodologies additional to the analysis of information organisation must be used.

People make sense of objects and events around them by classifying them into identifiable categories. The extent to which language affects this process has been the focus of a long-standing debate: Do different languages cause their speakers to behave differently? Here, we show that fluent German-English bilinguals categorize motion events according to the grammatical constraints of the language in which they operate. First, as predicted from cross-linguistic differences in motion encoding, bilingual participants functioning in a German testing context prefer to match events on the basis of motion completion to a greater extent than do bilingual participants in an English context. Second, when bilingual participants experience verbal interference in English, their categorization behavior is congruent with that predicted for German; when bilingual participants experience verbal interference in German, their categorization becomes congruent with that predicted for English. These findings show that language effects on cognition are context-bound and transient, revealing unprecedented levels of malleability in human cognition.

The aim of the current study is to investigate motion event cognition in second language learners in a higher education context. Based on recent findings that speakers of grammatical aspect languages like English attend less to the endpoint (goal) of events than do speakers of nonaspect languages like Swedish in a nonverbal categorization task involving working memory (Athanasopoulos & Bylund, 2013; Bylund & Athanasopoulos, 2015), the current study asks whether native speakers of an aspect language start paying more attention to event endpoints when learning a nonaspect language. Native English and German (a nonaspect language) speakers, and English learners of L2 German, who were pursuing studies in German language and literature at an English university, were asked to match a target scene with intermediate degree of endpoint orientation with two alternate scenes with low and high degree of endpoint orientation, respectively. Results showed that, compared to the native English speakers, the learners of German were more prone to base their similarity judgements on endpoint saliency, rather than ongoingness, primarily as a function of increasing L2 proficiency and year of university study. Further analyses revealed a nonlinear relationship between length of L2 exposure and categorization patterns, subserved by a progressive strengthening of the relationship between L2 proficiency and categorization as length of exposure increased. These findings present evidence that cognitive restructuring may occur through increasing experience with an L2, but also suggest that this relationship may be complex and unfold over a long period of time.

Time provides essential structure to human experience. This chapter reviews the available empirical evidence for a fundamental metaphoric structure such astime is spacein figurative language and thought. The chapter is organized into three over-arching themes: Motion through time, temporal succession, and duration estimation. A large part of the experimental evidence lends support to the psychological reality of thetime is spacemetaphor, revealing the inextricable link between conceptual metaphor in language and time perception. The review also reveals that linguistic space-time mappings may be overridden by cultural conventions, calling for further empirical cross-linguistic and cross-cultural exploration within experimental cognitive linguistics.

This study examined the extramural activities, that is, what a language learner does with the target language outside of class time, in Japanese of adult beginner level foreign language learners of Japanese studying at Stockholm University, Sweden, and how these activities relate to Japanese language proficiency. The study looked at both extramural activities and foreign language proficiency from a holistic and quantitative perspective. The participants' extramural activities were measured through self-reported data in a questionnaire, and several measures; a cloze test, earlier grades, and self-evaluations; were triangulated and used to provide an adequate measure of general Japanese language proficiency.

The results indicate that extramural activities which provide a foreign language learner with enough time for thorough processing of input and support through the usage of several cooperating modalities seem to have a positive effect on general foreign language acquisition.

To account for the full range of language use in contemporary multilingual urban contexts, the notion of target language (TL) needs to be reconsidered. In studies of second language acquisition and language variation, taking TL for granted implies that people agree on what constitutes 'good' language, or the standard norm. The TL of language learners and users is, however, more heterogeneous than is often assumed. To gain insight into what people are actually targeting in their language development and use, we need to study their perceptions of ambient sociolinguistic variation. In this folk linguistic listener study involving 343 upper secondary school students, a range of data types were analysed: attitude scales, variety labelling, and assessments of speakers' social and linguistic backgrounds. This article highlights some results pointing to a considerable divergence in the listeners' perceptions, in particular with regard to speech representing what is here characterised as migration-related social dialects. Several listeners labelled these samples as 'good' Swedish, possibly suggesting that they do not simply aim at or even relate to a TL identical with the dominating monolingual norm, but may instead have a less narrow view of the kind of Swedish they consider appropriate for use in more formal situations.

This article reflects on a creative visual-narrative approach to understanding South African students' lived experiences of languages. Data were collected in two interviews: the first entailing a biographical history and the drawing of a linguistic portrait on a simple body outline and the second a narrative interview utilising the portrait generated in the first as a basis for talking about language and identity. Framing the research process in this creative visual mode shifts the focus of narrative talk, simultaneously grounding it in affective, embodied experience, and enabling a reflexive position from which to analyse the taken-for-granted role of language in the minutiae of everyday life. The theoretical lenses of identity and subjectivity are invigorated through these metaphorical representations, and new creative possibilities are released for analysing the role of language in mediating shifting power dynamics in post-apartheid and postcolonial South African life.

This study examines the use of English loanwords in L1 isiXhosa-L2 English bilinguals living in Cape Town, South Africa. The specific aim of the study is to investigate which individual background factors may increase or reduce the presence of English loanwords in a L1 isiXhosa speaker's repertoire. Data on English loanword use and individual background were collected through a picture naming task and a background questionnaire, respectively. Results showed that those speakers who frequently used English for interactive purposes were more prone to using English loanwords when naming pictures in isiXhosa. Moreover, it was documented that those who arrived at an early age in Cape Town (from the isiXhosa-dominant Eastern Cape Province) were also less prone to using isiXhosa words in the naming task. Marginal, negative effects were found for non-interactive isiXhosa use (i.e. radio, books, etc.) and attitudes towards English, such that those speakers with high indices on these variables used more often English loanwords. A marginal, positive effect of the presence of isiXhosa in primary and secondary school on the use of isiXhosa words was also found.

This opening article introduces the reader to current topics in research on language and thought in monolingual speakers and second language (L2) learners, with particular attention to the domain of motion. The article also delineates the rationale that underlies the special issue at hand, and provides a contextualisation of the individual contributions. It is argued that the centrality of motion in everyday human life, in combination with the vast cross-linguistic variation in motion construal, makes motion events a suitable topic for SLA research, both in terms of ecological validity and learnability challenge. The pedagogical aspects of this line of research are discussed in terms of, first, whether it is desirable to include the acquisition of language-specific thought patterns in curricular goals, and second, whether the knowledge about language specificity in thought can be used in teaching as a means to facilitate learning.

Situated within the grammatical aspect approach to motion event cognition, this study takes a first step in investigating language and thought in functional multilinguals by studying L1 isiXhosa speakers living in South Africa. IsiXhosa being a non-aspect language, the study investigates how the knowledge and use of additional languages with grammatical aspect influence cognition of endpoint-oriented motion events among L1 isiXhosa speakers. Results from a triads-matching task show that participants who often used aspect languages and had greater exposure to English in primary education were less prone to rely on endpoints when categorising motion events.

The present study seeks to expand the current focus on acquisition situations in linguistic relativity research by exploring the effects of nativisation (the process by which a L2 is acquired as a L1) on language-specific cognitive behaviour. Categorisation preferences of goal-oriented motion events were investigated in South African speakers who learnt English as a L1 from caregivers who spoke English as a L2 and Afrikaans as a L1. The aim of the study was to establish whether the categorisation patterns found in the nativised English variety: (1) resemble patterns of L2 speakers of English with Afrikaans as a L1, (2) resemble patterns of L1 English speakers of a non-nativised English variety and (3) do not pattern with either of the above, but instead exhibit a distinct behaviour. It was found that simultaneous, functional bilinguals (Afrikaans and nativised English) patterned with L1 Afrikaans speakers, but the extent to which they did so was modulated by their frequency of use of Afrikaans. Functionally monolingual speakers of nativised English, on the other hand, patterned with L1 speakers of British English. This suggests that bilingualism, rather than nativisation, was a reliable predictor of event categorisation preferences.

The encoding of goal-oriented motion events varies across different languages. Speakers of languages without grammatical aspect (e.g., Swedish) tend to mention motion endpoints when describing events (e.g., two nuns walk <styled-content style=text-decoration:underline>to a house</styled-content>) and attach importance to event endpoints when matching scenes from memory. Speakers of aspect languages (e.g., English), on the other hand, are more prone to direct attention to the ongoingness of motion events, which is reflected both in their event descriptions (e.g., two nuns <styled-content style=text-decoration:underline>are walking</styled-content>) and in their nonverbal similarity judgements. This study examines to what extent native speakers (L1) of Swedish (n=82) with English as a foreign language (FL) restructure their categorisation of goal-oriented motion as a function of their proficiency and experience with the English language (e.g., exposure, learning history, etc.). Seventeen monolingual native English speakers from the United Kingdom (UK) were recruited for comparison purposes. Data on motion event cognition were collected through a memory-based triads matching task in which a target scene with an intermediate degree of endpoint orientation was matched with two alternative scenes with low and high degrees of endpoint orientation. Results showed that the preference among the Swedish speakers of FL English to base their similarity judgements on ongoingness rather than event endpoints was correlated with exposure to English in everyday life, such that those who often watched television in English approximated the ongoingness preference of the English native speakers. These findings suggest that event cognition patterns may be restructured through exposure to FL audiovisual media. The results add to the emerging picture that learning a new language entails learning new ways of observing and reasoning about reality.

How do humans construct their mental representations of the passage of time? The universalist account claims that abstract concepts like time are universal across humans. In contrast, the linguistic relativity hypothesis holds that speakers of different languages represent duration differently. The precise impact of language on duration representation is, however, unknown. Here, we show that language can have a powerful role in transforming humans' psychophysical experience of time. Contrary to the universalist account, we found language-specific interference in a duration reproduction task, where stimulus duration conflicted with its physical growth. When reproducing duration, Swedish speakers were misled by stimulus length, and Spanish speakers were misled by stimulus size/quantity. These patterns conform to preferred expressions of duration magnitude in these languages (Swedish: long/short time; Spanish: much/small time). Critically, Spanish-Swedish bilinguals performing the task in both languages showed different interference depending on language context. Such shifting behavior within the same individual reveals hitherto undocumented levels of flexibility in time representation. Finally, contrary to the linguistic relativity hypothesis, language interference was confined to difficult discriminations (i.e., when stimuli varied only subtly in duration and growth), and was eliminated when linguistic cues were removed from the task. These results reveal the malleable nature of human time representation as part of a highly adaptive information processing system.

Research on the relationship between grammatical aspect and motion event construal has posited that speakers of non-aspect languages are more prone to encoding event endpoints than are speakers of aspect languages (e. g., von Stutterheim and Carroll 2011). In the present study, we test this hypothesis by extending this line of inquiry to Afrikaans, a non-aspect language which is previously unexplored in this regard. Motion endpoint behavior among Afrikaans speakers was measured by means of a linguistic retelling task and a non-linguistic similarity judgment task, and then compared with the behavior of speakers of a non-aspect language (Swedish) and speakers of an aspect language (English). Results showed the Afrikaans speakers' endpoint patterns aligned with Swedish patterns, but were significantly different from English patterns. It was also found that the variation among the Afrikaans speakers could be partially explained by taking into account their frequency of use of English, such that those who used English more frequently exhibited an endpoint behavior that was more similar to English speakers. The current study thus lends further support to the hypothesis that speakers of different languages attend differently to event endpoints as a function of the grammatical category of aspect.

Language aptitude remains one of the most understudied predictor variables in L1 attrition research. The current study seeks to address this gap by investigating the effects of language aptitude on L1 retention in late attriters. Forty L1 Spanish - L2 Swedish bilinguals living in Sweden participated in the study, along with 20 functionally monolingual L1 speakers of Spanish. L1 proficiency was measured by means of a grammaticality judgement test (GJT) and language aptitude data were obtained through the LLAMA Language Aptitude Test (Meara 2005). Additional data on the participants' linguistic background were also collected. Results revealed a robust difference in GJT scores between the bilinguals and the control group. However, degree of language aptitude was not found to exert a significant influence on the bilinguals' GJT performance. Instead, the only significant predictor for GJT performance was linguistic identification, showing that those participants with strong L1 identification were more accurate in judging L1 grammaticality. The lack of aptitude effects on L1 attrition is discussed against the background of age-related attrition susceptibility.

This paper is concerned with media perceptions and how these manifest as hegemonic practices. Exploring the theme ‘language and politics’, against the backdrop of the Occupy Central with Love and Peace (OCLP) demonstrations in Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR), this paper sheds light on the discursive constructions of media representations in three ‘Chinese’[1] regions as well as on how such representations constitute vested interests. By addressing mediatised social, political and institutional discourses in the ‘Chinese’ context, this leads to an exploration as to how perceptions are embedded within larger socio-political discourses of sovereignty and legitimacy. The focus of analysis is the English-language press in Hong Kong (HK/HKSAR), China (PRC) and Taiwan (ROC). Critical discourse analysis is carried out on a series of thirteen newspaper articles[2] with the objective of making explicit the invisible ‘work’ that discursive strategies do in influencing interpretations and understanding of a political event in a non-Western context. Guided by Martin & White’s (2005) appraisal theory, the analysis views newspaper discourses not only as value-laden texts but by doing so also reveals readers’ and writers’ stance thus dispelling the myth that ‘news’ is objective. Findings depict varied perspectives on the Occupy Central demonstrations – Mainland and HK newspapers’ treatment were rather critical, while Taiwanese perceptions tended towards the analytical. This difference suggests HK and Mainland media as ideologically aligned – hegemonic – and positions Taiwanese media as potentially counter-hegemonic. Amidst issues of declining press freedoms, considerable variations were also found among the HK newspapers suggesting the presence press plurality. Regardless, media hegemony over public perceptions were found not only to contribute to and uphold certain interests vested in the maintenance of ‘Chinese’ sovereignty over HK under the ‘one country, two systems’ framework. Overall, findings confirmed just how influential a role the media plays as an extension of and in the realm of politics as well as in shaping public opinion. Through the lens ‘language and politics’, this paper explores the notion of ‘language’ and ‘discourse’, its functions and significance within non-English/Western national media systems. Such an examination thus highlights concepts and issues relevant in the field of bi-/multilingualism in society.

[1] The term ‘Chinese’ is used in inverted commas throughout this paper and is mainly employed as an umbrella term to refer to the regions of Hong Kong, Taiwan and China for expediency. However, the inverted commas also denote that caution should be exercised when using the term as a referent to either language, culture and/or people as it may index different norms depending on context. This point is further elucidated in the introductory part of this paper as the term ‘Chinese’ is viewed as a social construction.

[2] The data is taken from two newspapers per region with two news articles per newspaper, with the exception of Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post (SCMP) where 3 news articles were analysed.

The current study investigates motion event construal in Swedish speakers of L2 Spanish. In particular, the study examines the encoding of motion endpoints and manner of motion through elicited video clip descriptions of everyday motion event situations. The results show that Swedish learners of Spanish exhibit the same, high endpoint frequencies as their monolingual Swedish peers, thus deviating from the Spanish native pattern. Moreover, the learners used the same amount of manner verbs as Spanish natives, but were more prone to give additional manner information in periphrastic constructions. These findings are interpreted in relation to previous literature on the construal of motion events in L2 learners and the notion of conceptual transfer (Cadierno & Ruiz, 2006; Jarvis & Pavlenko, 2008; von Stutterheim, 2003).